Cubby's mom, gizzard trouble, and disease gone wild . .

Cubby’s mom almost died last night. I tweeted my concern from the hospital, so I’ll tell you the rest of the story here . . .



Here she is at 2AM, prior to undergoing extensive repair procedures. You can't see it in the images but she was rendered unserviceable by abdominal pain and was only smiling for the camera because they had fed her morphine.

It’s amazing how these things can turn so bad, so quick. Cubby’s mom (we have been divorced many years and she lives alone) felt some abdominal pain Sunday morning when she woke up. By noon the pain was bad enough for her to call the doctor.

She drove to the Repair Center at the University of Massachusetts. The doctors there were not really sure what to do with her. She didn’t seem too sick, but she was in a lot of pain. They talked about several possibilities. Diverticulitis . . . a kidney stone . . . or possibly an ovarian cyst.

Her pain got worse; by four o’clock she couldn’t really even stand. Five o’clock came around, and the folks at Umass decided it was time to ship her to the hospital. An ambulance was called, and she made the ten-mile journey to Cooley Dickinson Hospital.

That’s when she called Cubby and me. Things were looking, well, uncertain. I arrived at the hospital to find her resting in a room in the Emergency area. Cubby arrived a short while later with Kirsten, his girlfriend. Cubby and I looked at mom, and didn’t know what to think. She didn’t feel feverish, but she was complaining a lot, and she couldn’t stand up.

However, there was nothing obvious that we could do.

The nurses came in periodically to poke and prod. On one visit, they took blood samples. Then, having nothing else to do, they returned to take some more. But even that wasn’t enough. A fresh nurse came and took nose swabs.

“We’re looking for institutional infections,” the nurse said, with a hint of menace.

“She shouldn’t have any of those,” I said brightly. “She’s been out of State Prison almost three years now.”

The nurse snorted, and Cubby’s girlfriend asked her for a tour of the morgue. The nurse retreated quickly leaving Kirsten's morgue touring ambitions unfulfilled.

Cubby examined the wall outlets for oxygen, vacuum, and electricity. We pondered experiments with the available medical equipment, and we considered imaginative uses of the various tools in the room.

Still there was no diagnosis. Mom seemed to hurt more by the hour, but there was no visible reason. We considered the possibility of demons.

Nine o’clock came and went. “We’re going to send you for a See Tee scan,” the nurse announced. By that time, I was seeing tea myself, along with pasta shells, linguini with clams, and other dinner possibilities. We departed the hospital in search of food, leaving mom to be scanned at their leisure. Cubby and I went home to bed.

By eleven, mom’s biggest concern was whether they’d keep her overnight or if they’d dump her in the street at one o’clock on a rainy night. All that changed at 12:30. That’s when she called me and said they found a hole in her intestine.

It was diverticulitis gone bad. Something had gotten rotten and burst in her gut, and her innards were becoming suffused with vile filth. “We need to operate right away,” they said. I drove back to the hospital, in time to meet the surgeon who was as bright eyed and bushy tailed as one could want for two in the morning.

We were both rather alarmed, since any surgery that has to be done by firelight in the predawn darkness must be serious indeed. But the surgeon appeared unconcerned. “I’ve done three of these colon surgeries in the past ten days,” she said. Her confidence was reassuring. “The procedure should take about an hour,” she said, and they rolled mom into the operating room. I went out into the deserted waiting room, pulled up a couch, and tried to nap.



This is Holly Michaelson, the doctor who performed the repairs. I do not know if she is nocturnal or if she woke up just for us. I suspect the latter but in a place like the one we live in, the former is certainly a possibility.

Everyone in the area was dressed in those blue hospital gowns, with the exception of a geeky-looking guy in a shiny suit. At first, I thought he was the Sales Agent for those Krumedgeon Funeral Home people, but he turned out to be an innocent repairman from GE Medical Imaging.

An hour came and went. No word. That’s when I discovered the doors were all locked. I could not get out, and they could not get in. Hopefully someone in the operating room had a key, because I was finally in jail, alone in an empty part of the hospital. I pondered breaking the window to escape but I restrained myself by repeating "They did not mean to lock you in." And it seemed true . . . no one in his right mind would lock me in a glass walled room full of sharp and heavy objects.

I lay back down, and two hours passed. Still nothing. I reassured myself that she must at least be alive, because if she’d died they surely would have said something by now. Three hours came and went. Finally, fifteen minutes short of four hours after they began, the doctor appeared.

“It all went well,” she said. “You can see her in about half an hour, when she wakes up.” And she was right. Mom was awake and talking before dawn. However, her verbal abilities were limited and she was not very energetic.

The surgeon cut a three-inch incision in her groin, and snipped out several inches of rotten and pustulent intestine. Next, she disconnected the small and large intestines and routed the small intestine to a bag on mom’s side so the large intestine would have a chance to heal. As much of a nuisance as that seems, the detachable bag will make it easier for her to leave unwanted gifts for unpleasant people over the next few weeks That said, I am sure she will be anxious to return to normal digestive function.

“She’s going to need one or two more operations to put everything back together,” the surgeon said. “It may take six to eight weeks but she should make a full recovery.”

I think this was the kind of operation where if you wake up, it was deemed a success. It’s sort of like pilots say: any landing you can walk away from is a good one.



This is mom, just woken up, at 6:15.

I’m shocked that Cubby’s mom could get so sick, so fast. I guess she’s lucky she went to the doctor’s when she did. Fifteen years before, her dad died from a similar infection after walking around for two days with leaking guts. A few more hours on the loose, and the same thing might have happened to her.

Now she begins the process of recovery. It starts with suppressing the infection that’s brewing in her guts. They’ve got her on strong IV antibiotics, but 20% of people who have this surgery get serious infections anyway.

We’ll have to see what happens, and hope for the best.

It’s almost 11 o’clock. Day two is about to begin, and I am about to go to sleep.